1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data management device that manages a recording medium by recording a partition table having information regarding a partition and referring to the partition table, and to a method for managing a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hard disks are widely utilized as mass auxiliary storage devices. A medium format adopted by hard disks and semiconductor memories, different from many other disk systems, provides a function of dividing a physical drive into a plurality of partitions and using the plurality of partitions. Partition tables hold information regarding partitions in the hard disks. The partition tables reside in an area referred to as a master boot record (MBR) located in a first physical sector (i.e., 512-byte area) of the hard disks.
When hard disks have a capacity of 2 terabytes (TB) or more, partitions may not be formed using known partition tables. Accordingly, a technique (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-348195) has been suggested. In this known technique, whether or not partitions are formed in an area having a capacity of 2 TB or more is checked. If the partitions are formed in the area having a capacity of 2 TB or more, an area storing parameters in the CHS (Cylinder/Head/Sector) format is treated as an extended area storing parameters in the LBA (Logical Block Addressing) format. Accordingly, the size of the area storing the parameters in the LBA format is virtually extended by 3 bytes.
A technique described in the above-cited patent document works without problems between systems compatible with the technique. However, systems incompatible with the technique described in the patent document (hereinafter, referred to as “existing systems”) are incapable of recognizing an extended partition, which leads to inefficient utilization of the extended partition.
In addition, when many users share a hard disk having a capacity exceeding 2 TB, use of an interface that all users are used to is desirable. In particular, when a mass storage system is constructed by connecting a plurality of hard disks, it is desirable to provide a mechanism for managing the plurality of hard disks in an integrated fashion.